


A Long Road Home

by SKJC



Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: (Yuri's only mentioned in the story), Birthdays, Gen, Otabek Altin Week, POV Otabek Altin, Pre-Canon, Pre-Otayuri, Social Media, friendships, idk how else to tag this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-27 11:17:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12580624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SKJC/pseuds/SKJC
Summary: It has been four years, countless visa stamps in his passport, more airports than he can remember, a small collection of medals, and a large collection of teddy bears since he’s truly been home.Written primarily for Otabek Altin Week, day 7 - Birthday/Free Day.





	A Long Road Home

It’s just before Otabek’s thirteenth birthday that his childhood skating coach, who he’s known most of his life, suggests that he go abroad to train.

“There are better facilities in Russia, more resources,” he says to Otabek’s reluctant parents. “Their programs have created many successful athletes.”

They still aren’t thrilled about the idea of their only son moving away, but they agree, and Otabek’s mother helps him pack with tears glistening in the corners of her eyes. He tries his best not to notice.

Otabek doesn’t mind Russia, not at first. It’s not too far from home, and he has a good grasp of the language already. He moves his things into a small room into a dormitory for young athletes. His suitcase, duffel bag, and backpack take up most of the floor space and don’t take long to unpack. He places the only two personal items he had allowed himself to bring on the small stand next to the single bed - a family photo taken the year before, with his mother smiling widely at the center, and an old family copy of the Quran he had received from his father. They aren’t religious, but he values the connection to his family, history, and culture. 

The Russian coaches try to be tolerant of his relative shortcomings, his lack of grace and elegance. They blame his background, but he makes every effort to ensure they can find no fault with his work ethic. He is always the first one to arrive at any given workout or practice session, and the last to leave. 

In spite of his best efforts, it becomes increasingly clear that the Russians’ style will never be compatible with his body type or natural skill set. They send him to a special training camp with a different coaching team in hopes that it will better prepare him for his first season in juniors. The expectations there are even higher, and it feels like a major setback when he is forced back into the novice class.

He gives his best anyway, despite his dismay. A boy catches his eye in dance class, working at the barre with a cold, determined gaze that doesn’t match his exceedingly graceful movements at all, and Otabek is immediately fascinated, enthralled by him, even as his beauty makes Otabek feel even more painfully inadequate. 

He resolves to take the display of single-minded determination as a source of inspiration. That, plus his own innate stubbornness and misplaced sense of pride, prompt him to do his best to stick it out in Russia for a while longer, and he returns to his regular facility when the camp is over. It’s a few months into the competition season when he finally admits to himself that he needs to look elsewhere.

Back in his dormitory, he downloads an online English course onto the laptop that he uses for his correspondence schooling - his teachers have always nagged him to study it more seriously anyway - and calls his parents to tell them he wants to look for a coach in America. 

“Why would you want to go so far away?” His mother asks, shocked and confused, but his father assures him they will support his decision.

So, after less than a year in Russia, and just before his fourteenth birthday, he packs his meager belongings once again and boards a plane for an eight-thousand kilometer flight across the Atlantic Ocean to someplace called Colorado. All he knows about it is that it’s in the middle of America and that it’s cold. The flight attendant who shows him to his seat, since he is an unaccompanied minor, asks if he is going to America to visit family.

“No,” he says, not intending to be rude but not really wanting to answer more questions. She doesn’t ask any more.

Otabek’s new coach lives in a large old house and puts some of his athletes up in the spare bedrooms, and Otabek moves into the only one that is currently unoccupied. It seems less sterile than his dormitory room in Russia. A thin layer of dust has settled on the basic wooden furniture, and it makes him sneeze when he sets his laptop down on the small desk. The wallpaper seems old-fashioned, and the quilt covering the bed seems handmade. 

He pushes his thoughts about his surroundings aside and digs his skates out of their protective case in his duffel bag. At least the ice will be the same, he thinks, even if that’s the only thing.

He learns the time difference so that he can call home without waking up the entire family in the middle of the night. His mother swears it doesn’t matter, he can call any time, but he knows his sisters need to sleep. 

A middle-aged man derides him in the checkout of the grocery store for his slow, accented English one day while he is paying for his cups of yogurt and bag of rice. He stares blankly, unsure how to respond or if he even should, until his rinkmate Leo, who had accompanied him out, cuts in to ask the man how many languages  _ he _ is able to speak. Leo adds something at the end of his sentence in Spanish that sounds rude to Otabek even though he doesn’t understand it.

“Thank you,” Otabek says as they leave the store, and Leo shrugs.

“Some people are jerks,” he replies, “but they don’t know your life.”

Otabek can’t dispute that sentiment. Later, Leo introduces him to American music, rock and pop stations on the radio, and he finds that listening to the lyrics helps him improve his English. He begins to learn about music composition and theory in his free time, and wonders if one day he could create his own music to skate to. 

He adjusts as best he can, but his first junior season ends up being somewhat disappointing. Moving and changing coaches in the fall hadn’t been conducive to immediate success, but he knows that it had been a necessary decision. His coach reassures him that he will be even better prepared for the next year, and he forces himself to believe that it’s possible. It has to be.

He works as hard as he can throughout the offseason, going to various workshops and training events, and his determination pays off the following fall. He clinches a spot for the Junior Grand Prix Final just before he turns fifteen. It feels like vindication.

The Final isn’t until December, the same time as the senior level competition, and it’s a cold morning when he and his coach board a flight to Japan - somewhere else he has never been. He endures the full day of travel without complaint, and sleeps when he is “supposed to” upon arrival by sheer force of will, jet lag be damned.

Otabek’s time in Japan draws to a close with a set of career-best scores on the scoreboard and a bronze medal around his neck. Elated, he calls his parents immediately after the medal ceremony, and his mother weeps with joy into the phone until his father takes it away from her.

“We’re very proud of you,” he says, and Otabek has never before heard his stoic, restrained father sound so happy.

On their return flight, Otabek’s coach sadly informs him that he will be retiring from coaching at the end of the season to deal with some issues in his own family. After junior Worlds in the spring, Otabek will need to find somewhere else to go. 

After hearing the news, one of Otabek’s other rinkmates, a loud and brash Canadian boy named JJ, which is short for something French that Otabek never learned to pronounce, announces that he will return to his home country to train for his senior debut in the fall, with his parents as his trainers and coaches. He extends an offer to Leo and Otabek to go there with him, and Otabek accepts, having no other immediate options on the table. Leo declines, having already decided to go back to his old coach in Detroit. 

Otabek wonders what Canada will be like.

In the meantime, his rinkmates finally manage to convince him to get on social media. He creates an Instagram account and a Twitter account. The idea seems ridiculous - his life is not so interesting that it needs to be publicly documented. 

He follows JJ and Leo, at their insistence, and a small handful of other skaters he barely knows, as well as a few of his friends back home. After a bit of hesitation, he also follows Yuri Plisetsky, the young Russian boy from that training camp that he hasn’t ever quite been able to put out of his mind. His social media accounts are all full of dance and skating photos. Otabek wonders who takes all of the photos for him to post. There are some selfies of him with a red-haired girl who Otabek has seen at competitions, but he can’t recall her name. Could they be siblings? They don’t look alike, at least he doesn’t think so. 

It shocks Otabek when his follower count on Twitter is in the hundreds after just a few days when he’s barely posted anything at all. Most of them appear to be skating fans from Kazakhstan. Several have his press photos from the the Final on their profiles. In an abstract sense, he has always wanted to compete for the pride of his country, but reading the words of encouragement from people back home gives him a very concrete sense of what that really means to them. 

He desperately hopes not to disappoint them.

He comes home from Worlds feeling like he has. A stumble on a triple axel in his free skate was his only major error, but it was just enough to miss the medal standings by a fraction of a point. Even so, his Twitter feed is filled with praise from the fans at home, proud that he even came close to a medal. 

He is still upset with himself weeks later when he packs his things yet again for the move northward. 

Mercifully, the flight to Montreal is a relatively short one, because JJ talks the entire time and Otabek is too polite to put on headphones to drown him out. Instead, he flips through the magazines he purchased in the airport terminal and nods along periodically. 

Otabek crashes on the couch in the living room of JJ’s parents’ house for a few weeks while he looks for a place to live. The presence of younger siblings reminds him of his sisters back home. It depends on the day whether he finds that comforting or annoying. He finally finds someone willing to rent him a room, despite his young age - they’ve heard of him through skating, and they draw up an arrangement for his parents to wire money for rent. 

The room is unfurnished. Otabek buys a foam mattress that comes in a box and puts it on the floor, adorned with a set of cheap bedsheets and a single pillow. My mother would be horrified, he thinks when he looks around the bare room, but he doesn’t want to bother with accumulating more things when he’ll probably need to move again in a year or two.

It seems like everyone in the city speaks French, a language he has never studied. His English is passably good by this point, and people begrudgingly converse with him in English instead, but sometimes he gets the definite feeling that people look down their noses at him over it. His landlord is one of them. He shrugs it off, tries not to ask for much, and keeps to himself as much as he can outside of skating. 

He works more with music in his limited free time, and downloads some computer software to compose, synthesize, and mix. He needs to do an elective project to finish his compulsory schooling anyway, and he has grown to love many more types of music than he used to appreciate. Besides, he doesn’t have any better ideas, and he can’t spend every waking second at the rink. The hockey team has to practice too. He finds that Canadians take hockey very, very seriously. 

As annoying as JJ can be, Otabek does find that training alongside him is helpful. JJ’s plan to dethrone Victor Nikiforov as the best men’s singles skater in the world is ambitious and not incredibly likely, in Otabek’s opinion, but it does involve a lot of specialized work aimed at taking his jumping skills to a higher level.

Otabek watches with envy over the summer as JJ’s shaky quad Salchow slowly becomes rock-solid with practice, and the coaching team finally lets him start doing the drills to learn a quad Lutz. Otabek’s only quad is the toe loop, and it’s a fifty-fifty shot on any given try. He knows he will need to be better if he ever plans to move up to seniors. 

One day, JJ offers to teach him the Salchow, behind the coaches’ backs. He knows he should say no. Instead, he graciously accepts, and they work on it whenever they can. He still isn’t sure if they’re friends or not. He’s fairly certain JJ thinks so.

Every time Otabek checks his social media, there are photos and videos of Yuri Plisetsky preparing for his first season in juniors. He’s only thirteen and looks like a firestorm on the ice. There are poor-quality cell phone videos on YouTube of him landing quads in practice. Otabek watches them, awestruck, and wonders if he’ll do them in the Junior Grand Prix. No one else would dare, he thinks, but he already knows that Yuri is like no one else.

Otabek competes at the JGP events in Slovenia and Germany shortly before he turns sixteen, and returns to his sparse rented room in Montreal having secured a spot in the Final once again. The previous year feels less like a fluke after that, and he rededicates himself to training with all the determination he can muster. 

His season is derailed in early November when a sudden popping sound and a jolt of white-hot pain in the back of his left thigh during jumping practice sends him crashing to the ice. 

He calls his parents from his hospital bed after the nurses and technicians have finished taking him for x-rays and imaging scans. It’s after midnight in Almaty, he knows that when he dials the number, and no one answers the phone. That’s fine with him, he’d rather tell them this news in a voicemail message. 

It’s a nearly complete tear of his hamstring, the orthopedic surgeon says, after reviewing an MRI scan and manipulating his swollen leg while he lies prone on an uncomfortable metal exam table. An odd injury for someone his age, the doctor observes, so he must not have warmed up sufficiently. It’s not quite severe enough to require surgery, but he’ll need at least two weeks of rest followed by at least eight more of physical therapy and rehabilitation before he can return to skating. 

“I’m supposed to compete at Worlds in four months,” Otabek says, when the doctor asks if he has any questions. He knows that isn’t a question, but he’d counted the time in his head on the way to the emergency room. 

The doctor hums for a moment, regarding him carefully. “Take it one day at a time,” he says. “It’s too soon to know for sure whether or not that will be possible.”

It’s not the answer Otabek was looking for, but it’s the one he’s stuck with whether he likes it or not.

He spends the next couple of weeks putting ice packs on his leg and re-wrapping the tight elastic bandages as necessary, and figures out how to get in and out of his floor-level bed with crutches. He has to order several more pillows online with next-day shipping in order to be even remotely comfortable spending this much time laying around.

When he starts physical therapy, he makes sure to schedule the sessions around the times there will be internet livestreams of the Grand Prix Final. He isn’t sure whether or not he’ll watch, but he wants to have the option. 

Of course, he watches. 

He watches as Yuri Plisetsky dominates the junior competition with programs that would outscore his own on the best day he’s never had. 

He watches as Victor Nikiforov puts up new world record scores in the senior competition, and he watches as JJ flubs his newly-acquired quad Lutz in both programs to finish off the podium. That idiot, Otabek thinks, there were good reasons he’d been told not to attempt it yet. 

After he turns off the last day’s video stream, he makes a decision. There won’t be any further benefit for him to continue competing at the junior level. Regardless of what happens at junior Worlds, whether or not he’s even able to compete, he has to move up to seniors next season. He’s already old enough, according to the rules, he just has to work harder to be ready. 

His rehab takes longer than expected, and the doctors give him the okay to return to his full intensity of training just four weeks before he’s supposed to compete Worlds. 

In a repeat of the previous year, he ends up with a fourth place finish, this time due to no particular error, just his lack of preparation. He genuinely expected to do worse, and he apologizes to his fans on social media, and announces his plans to compete as a senior in the fall. They shower him with praise he still feels is undeserved. 

Otabek’s parents want him to come home and visit in early summer. He tells them that he can’t, he has an intensive schedule to keep to. After being out of training for so long with his injury, he won’t really have much of an off-season. He hires a new choreographer to work with his coaches on programs that will be suitable for his desired reinvention of his image as an athlete.

In his senior debut, Otabek does well in his Challenger series events in the United States and Russia, and earns a second place overall finish against a much less stacked field than the Grand Prix. The prize money doesn’t cover the costs of attending the competitions, but he finds the experience invaluable. His GP events in Canada and France are much more difficult, and he just barely fails to qualify for the Final, sure that he would have made it if he had received different assignments. In the whirlwind of it all, he forgets his own seventeenth birthday.

At least I’m not injured this year, Otabek thinks bitterly, as he watches JJ win third place behind Victor Nikiforov and Christophe Giacometti. The Japanese man who finishes last, over a hundred points lower than Nikiforov, is abysmal to watch - Otabek is sure he could have done better than that. 

February rolls around, and at the Four Continents Championship in Taiwan, he does. JJ wins the gold medal, and Otabek wins silver by a fraction of a point above the third place skater, Cao Bin from China. His fans - he can still barely believe he has _fans_ \- litter the ice with a variety of stuffed teddy bears. Who decided to start that, he has no idea, but he keeps some of his favorites and takes photos with them for his social media. Everyone tells him it’s in his best interests to be popular online. 

There are many things Otabek doesn’t like about east Asia - the way the languages sound, the strange food, the social customs that are different from anywhere he’s actually spent any significant amount of time. Maybe he’s just lived in North America for too long. In any case, he finds Taiwan an odd place, and he’s glad to leave it.

He returns to his training with a determination to do his absolute best at Worlds. Four Continents didn’t require him to compete against the extremely skilled skaters from Europe, and the scores from the European Championship are daunting. 

Otabek watches an internet livestream of junior Worlds just to see Yuri Plisetsky compete. Everyone knows that the Russian prodigy will be senior-eligible in the fall, and no one can predict what he is going to do. He jumps two quads in his free program, and his coach looks furious, even on the grainy video. The sheer audacity of it makes Otabek chuckle.

With that in mind as his inspiration, Otabek competes in his first senior level ISU World Championships. For as long as he has been skating, it’s the first time he’s ever felt perfect on the ice, free and unrestrained. He thinks of his friends and family at home in as he executes his step sequence with an uncharacteristically elegant ease, his fans and their teddy bears as he flows through his combination spins, and the piercing eyes of Yuri Plisetsky as he lands a clean quad Salchow. 

It’s not enough for a gold medal, but it is enough to beat JJ for the bronze, and this time it’s Otabek that stands on the podium with Nikiforov and Giacometti, camera flashes going off in his face and making him look more angry than pleased. Perhaps the other two have already had their retinas burned out, he thinks when he sees the photos. 

It isn’t long before Otabek hears from his old childhood coach again. Apparently the national skating federation wants him to come back to train in Kazakhstan, to be the face of figure skating in their country, to be their national hero. Other skaters from his country have achieved moderate success on the international level, but between his results at Four Continents and Worlds, he is their best yet.

Otabek weighs his options. JJ and his family are moving to Toronto so that he can attend university there while he continues training, and Otabek already knows he is welcome to go with them and keep working with JJ’s parents as his coaches. He’s been to Toronto before, knows he could live there. He thinks about it for three weeks after he returns to Montreal, in his rented room that is still furnished only with his cheap foam mattress and what is now far too many pillows. He looks at the old family photo he still keeps framed by his bed, and he realizes that it feels like that was a lifetime ago.

It has been four years, countless visa stamps in his passport, more airports than he can remember, a small collection of medals, and a large collection of teddy bears since he’s truly been home.

He calls his parents and asks if they’ve given his old room to any of his sisters yet. His mother cries when she realizes what he means.  

**Author's Note:**

> I spent a lot of time trying to work out a timeline for this based on my own interpretation of when the events of the series canon take place, and then gave up and avoided mentioning dates, but I did borrow locations from some actual seasons of ISU skating. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
> I got most of my information regarding who knows who from where and when on the YOI Wiki.
> 
> Thanks for the title goes to Rodinia from the Otayuri Writers Collective Discord server!


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